


Wolves and Women

by onethingconstant



Series: Wolves and Women [1]
Category: Black Panther (2018), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: And sometimes falls out of them, Becca Barnes (mentioned) - Freeform, Big Brother Bucky Barnes, Bucky Barnes & Shuri Friendship, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Bucky climbs trees a lot, Bucky just adopts waifs and strays, Cats, Dora Milaje cameo, Everyone Needs A Hug, Flower Crowns, Gen, Gifts, Heart-Shaped Herb (Marvel), I Don't Even Know, Jewish Bucky Barnes, Post-Black Panther (2018), Pre-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Running, Shuri needs a hug, but not a lot, lots of sass, one-armed Bucky, very bad Xhosa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-25
Updated: 2018-04-25
Packaged: 2019-04-27 17:42:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14430807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onethingconstant/pseuds/onethingconstant
Summary: In which Shuri has a secret mission, Bucky has a secret hobby, and another little surrogate family is formed.Or, how Bucky and Shuri saved the future of Wakanda and became the most terrifying sibling act in the MCU.





	Wolves and Women

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, everyone! I'm sorry I've been away so long. Real Life has been an absolute bastard. We will resume our regularly scheduled programming soon (I hope, and always assuming _Infinity War_ doesn't kill us all). Until then, have a little fluffy bit of Bucky and Shuri being friends.

_“Wolves and women are relational by nature, inquiring, possessed of great endurance and strength. They are deeply intuitive, intensely concerned with their young, their mate and their pack. Yet both have been hounded, harassed and falsely imputed to be devouring and devious, overly aggressive, of less value than those who are their detractors.”_

_-Clarissa Pinkola Estes_

The problem with having a king for a brother, Shuri reflected, was that very few people were entitled to tell him when he was making an ass of himself.

It wasn't entirely his fault, she knew. With all the chaos since their father's death, T'Challa had scarcely had a minute to himself. He was set upon from all sides, however well-meant the attacks might be—people hurling their support at him, or firing questions, or launching the first salvo of the long battle that would be _When are you going to marry and give Wakanda an heir?_ He had precious little time to sit in the lab with her, volleying jokes or tormenting her with his ridiculous fashion choices. (Which was a shame. She had an entire YouTube playlist of cats falling off tables to retaliate with.) 

In comparison to bearing the mantles of Black Panther and king, being a suddenly fatherless sixteen-year-old genius was almost manageable. 

Almost.

She made it a full month past Killmonger's abortive revolution before she borrowed a Talon Fighter, flew to the shore of Echibi Ingcuka, and headed for the forest. She wore loose clothing and carried only a light pack—a knife, a lightweight cloak, a bottle for water, a kimoyo bracelet in case she got into _real_ trouble. But she wouldn't. She never did. 

She felt the muscles in her shoulders loosen as she passed into the shadow of the trees. The smell of the forest rose around her: new greenery in the canopy above, decaying leaves under her feet, the heavy sweetness of flowers all around. She might not have the Black Panther's senses, but she knew the scent of home. This place was it, as much as her lab was. 

She walked faster, then broke into a long, loping run. 

The jungle blurred around her, flashes of brown and gold and every brilliant shade of green. She took an old trail into the heart of the forest, building up speed on the straightaways and swinging around the curves. She hurdled the occasional log, and once startled a grandfather bird, which flew up, squawking and scolding, toward a gap in the canopy. She counted herself lucky it hadn't thrown up the bones of its lunch on her, and ran on, letting the rhythm of running quiet the constant roaring of her brain. 

She slowed down when she felt her legs starting to burn, and stopped at a stream to fill her bottle. 

Which was when the lunatic fell out of the tree overhead. 

She did not consciously choose to drop the bottle, take three rapid spring-steps back and whip out her knife, but Okoye had trained her reasonably well and she wasn't above taking advantage. She held the blade relaxed and ready as the hulking body scrambled to its feet. 

And immediately thrust one hand into the air.

Her first mad thought was _Is he trying to high-five me?_ because honestly, a white man in the forest sticking his hand in the air had to be trying to do that or answer the question of an invisible teacher. Then she realized he had only one arm, the stump of the other hidden in the folds of his incorrectly pinned robes. 

Her second thought was _He could have asked someone to pin those properly for him_ , followed by _He probably did_ and _Whatever you do, don't laugh at the broken white boy who clearly does not understand the Wakandan sense of humor._

“Sorry!” Sergeant Barnes blurted, waving his one remaining hand in frantic surrender. “Sorry, sorry! Uh—I come in peace!”

Shuri blinked at him. 

“What are you apologizing for?” she demanded, blinking again when she realized her voice had come out unexpectedly shrill. “You cannot possibly be afraid of a sixteen-year-old girl with a single knife!”

“Uh,” Sergeant Barnes said, his hand still hovering over his head. “Are you okay, miss? Um, your highness?”

Shuri frowned at him.

“You didn't hit me,” she said. “You idiot.” 

Sergeant Barnes sagged as if someone had poked a hole in his inner balloon. “Oh, thank God,” he said, and then caught himself and straightened up. “Um, I mean, thank—gods? Whatever the gods are around here?”

Shuri thought of a half-dozen possible responses to that, but none would have made the situation less awkward, so she settled for, “Sergeant Barnes, what in the name of Bast were you doing halfway up a tree?”

His face wrinkled like a piece of rotting fruit. “Uh.”

Shuri waited.

“Uh—do I have to tell you? Is there a law or something?”

Shuri rolled her eyes. “No, Sergeant. We are merely having a conversation. Or at least we are trying.” 

“I...would rather not say.” He looked pained. 

“Fine.” She sheathed the knife and turned away. “I wish you luck with whatever it is. Try not to fall on anybody.” She crouched down to pick up her bottle from the streambed, shake the sand out of it, and finish filling it. Behind her, she heard the rustle of robes as he slowly lowered his arm.

She felt his eyes on her as the bottle gurgled its way to fullness. 

After a moment, he asked, “Is that safe?”

“Is what safe?” She lifted the bottle out of the stream and screwed the cap back on. 

“The water. Doesn't it have bacteria in it?”

She shook her head. “The vibranium in the soil acts as a natural filtration system. All the water in Wakanda is safe to drink, except for untreated sewage.” She stood up, shook the bottle to dry it, and slipped it back into her pack. 

“Oh. That's … really great.”

She shot him a side-eye. “Have you been packing water into the jungle on your adventures, Sergeant?”

He shook his head, his eyes wide and pale as a winter sky. “No. But I don't really get sick.” He shrugged awkwardly with a shoulder and a half. “Serum.” 

She should have known that. Bast, she _was_ distracted. “Well, you won't need it for that. Good luck to you, Sergeant.” She turned away again.

“Um.” 

Shuri groaned and turned back. “ _What?_ ”

“Are you—looking for something? Or just—walking?” He somehow managed to wince with his entire face.

“Primarily,” she said, letting her tone frost over, “I am running so I can _stop thinking_ for a while. Secondarily, I am looking for herbs.” 

“What kind?” 

“Nunya.” 

He frowned. “I've never heard of nunya.” 

“Nunya business!” she snapped, and took off running again.

*

Two weeks later, she returned to the rainforest. This time, the Sergeant didn't fall. He melted out of the foliage and stood there, blinking at her and holding out a water bottle.

“What is that for?” she demanded. 

“In case you get thirsty,” he said. 

She took it, narrow-eyed, and ran on. 

Half a kilometer away, she poured the contents of the bottle onto a bush, just in case. A grandfather bird shrieked at her, but she was moving too fast.

*

A week after that, she turned down a bend in the trail, saw a flash of bright blue, and stopped dead.

Hanging from a branch in front of her was a wreath of delicately woven vines, studded with bright blue ifu flowers, the ones that only grew in the uppermost layers of the rainforest canopy. 

Shuri looked around, but there was no sign of the one-armed colonizer. 

“You are going to break your unreasonably pale neck!” she called, apparently to no one. 

She ran on. 

An hour later, she circled back and snatched the flower crown with a growl of annoyance.

She would tell no one of this.

*

Whatever Barnes was doing, he was committed to it. Every time she entered the forest, there was a small gift for her somewhere along the trail. Even though she took a _different route every time_ —was he somehow hiding things along every path in the grove? Shadowing her? It was maddening.

The gifts were minor things. A little bundle of flowers, expertly bound with braided vines. A pile of colorful stones arranged in a decorative pattern. A small panther statuette, carved from what looked like a dead tree limb. Drawings chalked on boulders and tree trunks—birds, mostly, or other small creatures of the forest. Barnes had a good eye for detail, and his sketches had a sense of delicate movement about them, as if they were about to take flight. 

She wondered why he did it. There were no words with the gifts, not ever, even though the periodic reports she received about his recovery from Hydra's conditioning told her he was perfectly capable of both speech and writing. He was choosing not to explain himself. It was difficult to understand the mind of a man who had been born a hundred years ago in a faraway country. Was he trying to court her? To apologize for startling her that first time? To repay her for her help in giving him back his mind? 

It was a mystery. A challenge. 

Shuri _loved_ those. Perhaps the puzzle was a gift in itself. 

After two months of finding secret gifts in the woods, she decided to challenge him right back. She headed into the forest at top speed, not bothering to warm up, and chose turns and forks completely at random, trying to outrun his preparations, whatever they might be. 

_I will_ make _you show yourself_ , she thought. 

For half an hour, she pounded the dirt, switching tracks as often as the opportunity arose, and she saw no sign of Barnes. No chalk marks on the landscape, no flashes of color. Ordinarily she would have hit one of his surprises by now. He had to be getting frustrated. 

She was just congratulating herself on outwitting him for once when she stepped in the mudhole and her knee twisted out of alignment. 

She went down with a yelp of surprise and pain, and there was a sudden crashing from the canopy as her ass hit the mud with a wet _splutch_. The lopsided shadow landed in a crouch front of her, and then her field of vision was full of loose brown hair and worried blue eyes. 

“What happened?” he demanded. “Why were you running _here?_ ”

“What are you talking about?” she snapped back. “I always run here! Why are _you_ following me?” She hissed as he prodded at her twisted knee. 

“I was keeping an eye on you,” he muttered, frowning at whatever his fingers were telling him, “because you looked pissed off and you weren't paying attention to your surroundings.” He tilted his head toward the nearest tree. “Obviously.” 

Shuri blinked and looked around. 

_Oh._

She had been keeping only loose track of where she was in the forest, but now that she looked, she saw fat ubudala trees, wrapped with creeping inyoka vines. The kind that grew only in the lowest, oldest part of the forest, where the soil was wet and slippery year-round. 

A terrible place for anyone to be running. 

“I think you sprained it,” Barnes announced. “Can you stand?” 

Shuri gritted her teeth. She gripped the remains of Barnes' left shoulder, let him slip his right arm around her waist, and heaved herself up on her good leg. Then she swung her injured one under her weight and tried to rest on it. 

It felt like Okoye had stabbed her spear into the kneecap. She screamed into her teeth and let Barnes take her weight again. 

“Okay,” Barnes said, his voice low and soothing. “You're not walking out of here on your own. I can help you limp out, or I can carry you, or I can go get somebody. It's up to you.”

Shuri hissed and held up her left wrist with its kimoyo bracelet. 

“Oh,” Barnes said. “Right. You can call somebody too. Do you want to do that?”

Shuri narrowed her eyes at him and thought it through. 

“If I did,” she said finally, “Okoye would make me train every day for a month to correct my carelessness.”

Barnes' mouth slowly began to quirk up on one side. 

“You are not carrying me,” Shuri said. “I am not that kind of princess.” 

He nodded. 

He shuffled around beside her, getting his arm around her waist to support her on her injured side, and together they began to walk. It was agonizingly slow, and Shuri was certain she'd chosen the least efficient option, but Barnes never complained once. 

After ten minutes of limping, she asked, “Why do you spend so much time here?”

Barnes snorted gently through his nose. “It's pretty stupid.” 

“More stupid than this?”

He tilted his head in acknowledgment. “Okay, yeah. Before I was—you know,” he wiggled the stump of his left shoulder, “I was a sniper in the war. I spent a lot of time sitting in trees, waiting to take my shots. Used to sleep up there sometimes, even. It got so I felt weird walking around on the ground.” He shrugged, or tried. “I remember my whole life now, even the stuff before the war, but—it's like it all happened to a different person. I don't like thinking about the Winter Soldier, but I can't be Bucky from Brooklyn either. But the guy who used to sleep in trees? He feels a little closer to who I am now. So I've been trying to get back to him.” He flicked a glance at her. “I thought maybe the forest was sacred or something, so I didn't tell anybody. I don't want to cause trouble, you know?”

“Good job,” Shuri said dryly. 

“Hey, if you'd asked, I'd'a told you not to run there.” 

Shuri snorted. 

“What about you? You seem to be coming here a lot all of a sudden.” 

Shuri pursed her lips. “Can you keep a secret?”

“You know I can.” 

She looked down at the mud for a moment to gather her thoughts. 

“My brother,” she began, “received the powers of the Black Panther from the heart-shaped herb. It was the gift of the goddess Bast, to enable him to protect the land and people of Wakanda.” 

Barnes nodded. “Guy does a good job of that. Not that I've got a personal stake or anything.” 

She couldn't help a small smile. “It was his goal from when we were children, to be worthy of it someday. Every generation has its Black Panther. My brother was determined that it would be him, and that he would pass the herb on to the next generation. There were secret gardens within the sacred mountain where the herb was cultivated.” 

“Were?”

Shuri sighed. “Eric Stevens. Killmonger. He burned the gardens. Only a single bulb was saved, and we had to use it to save my brother's life in the Jabari-lands.” 

Barnes hummed softly to himself. “So now there's nothing for the next generation. You're looking for a wild supply. And for some reason you don't know where it grows?” 

“The goddess Bast revealed it to the first Black Panther. That plant became our gardens.” 

“So now you need to find it without her?”

“If it grows in Wakanda, we can find it,” Shuri said stubbornly. “ _I_ can find it.”

“Yeah? How's that workin' out?” 

Shuri glared. 

Barnes huffed. “Your brother doesn't know you're doing this, does he?”

“He—” Shuri shook her head. “He has asked me to synthesize a replacement in case the original cannot be found. Even if Bast will not help us, he wants Wakanda to remain protected.” 

Barnes sighed heavily. “Wakandan super-soldier serum. Lemme guess. It's harder than it looks.” 

“I can _do it_ ,” Shuri growled. “But _this_ is better. Developing a replacement will take years, perhaps decades, even for me. Biology is not my specialty. What we need is a fresh natural supply _and_ a synthetic replacement for the _next_ emergency.” 

Barnes gave her a look that was almost admiring. “Damn, kid. You really think ahead, don't you?”

“Somebody has to,” she sniffed. “My brother barely thinks at all.” 

Barnes snorted a laugh. Shuri smiled a little. 

They shuffled on in silence for several minutes.

Then Barnes said, “I used to have a little sister like you.” 

“I doubt that very much.” 

“Heh. No, I guess not really _like_ you. You're definitely one of a kind. But she _was_ brilliant. Becca, her name was. She scared the hell out of me.” 

“Good for her,” Shuri said firmly. 

Barnes actually giggled. “You two woulda been friends, you know that? _Terrifying_ friends. Becca an' me, we were a real pair. Coupla Irish twins, born less'n a year apart.” His accent crept in, flat and twanging, like a slap in the face compared to Wakandan speech. “But she was _so_ much smarter'n I was. She taught _me_ all my math an' science. I loved it 'cause of her. I used to read science fiction stories in the pulps and wonder why those authors weren't smart enough to put a Becca in there. Because let me tell ya, if anybody was gonna build a death ray or a rocket ship to go to Pluto, it'd be my sister.” 

“What happened to her?” Shuri asked. 

Barnes sighed heavily. “Life, mostly. Nobody in Brooklyn in the thirties thought much of a girl who was too smart for her own good. She walked into her first day of trig class, sat down, and the teacher told her to get out. Said she didn't need trig to balance the family checkbook.” 

“What did she do?”

“Stayed, of course.” His smile was bright and proud. “Got the top score on everything. Proved everybody wrong, always. But,” he sighed, “outta school, it was different. She couldn't afford to go to college, no matter how smart she was. No science scholarships for girls. She ended up workin' for the telephone company as an operator.” 

“That sounds incredibly boring.” Shuri made a face as her knee twinged. 

“Oh, I'm sure it was. But she pulled a few strings here an' there, met the right people. And she got to be a spy. Turned out she spoke about twenty languages.” He chuckled. “They threw her outta science class, so she went out and learned how to talk to everybody in the neighborhood. I used to practice with her. I got to Europe speaking enough German and Italian that my CO thought _I_ was a spy.” His chuckle turned into a wheezy laugh. 

“Is that why you left me those presents?” Shuri asked. “Because of your sister?”

He nodded. “I used to do that kinda stuff for her all the time. I'd bring her a piece of candy, or a library book, or a new dance move—whatever I could find to give her something to think about. It helped her calm down. She told me the worst part of being brilliant was how _stupid_ everybody else was. She wanted to smack 'em all upside the head until their brains worked right.” He smiled. “She an' Steve _definitely_ got the Irish temper.” 

Shuri arched an eyebrow. “Oh, yeah? What about you?”

“Ma was Jewish. I took after that side. Never piss off a Jew. We'll wait a hundred years if we have to an' then blow your head off.” 

“Isn't that more or less what you did to Hydra?”

Barnes grinned toothily. 

“I would have liked to meet her,” Shuri said softly. “She sounds interesting.” 

“Comin' from you, that's high praise. She'd have gone bonkers if she'd met a princess.”

“Oh, please,” Shuri sniffed. “She'd have _gone bonkers_ if she'd seen a hoverbike.” 

“You guys have hoverbikes?”

*

It took a few days for Shuri's knee to right itself, and another week to catch up on backlog in the lab. She'd taken on a few new projects.

“Princess Shuri?” 

Shuri turned away from her screen, casually swiping away the image of an exploded cybernetic arm. “Yes, Ayo?”

The shaven-headed Dora Milaje strode into the lab as if she owned the place and handed over an envelope. “From the King's guest.” 

Shuri frowned at it. “Hasn't he heard of email?”

“He is not permitted any electronic devices,” Ayo replied. “For security reasons.” 

“No wonder he sleeps in the trees,” Shuri muttered, and slit the envelope open. 

The reports hadn't done his writing justice, she noticed. No one had thought to mention that Barnes wrote in perfect Spencerian script. 

_Princess,_

_Please do me the honor of joining me for a run next Tuesday. I look forward to showing you the new dance move I have perfected._

_Bucky_

Shuri felt Ayo's eyes on her and looked up. 

“Dance move?” the Dora asked, one eyebrow arching. 

“The man has profound brain damage,” Shuri said stiffly. “He is probably confused.”

Ayo sniffed.

*

“The Dora Milaje think you are trying to seduce me,” Shuri said as soon as she saw Bucky the following Tuesday.

She had been careful to wait until he was halfway through taking a swig from his water bottle. He choked, and water and mucus spurted from his nose. 

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” he gagged, wiping his face. “Do they _know_ I'm a hundred years old?”

“I don't think they care,” she said. 

Bucky stared at her in horror. 

Shuri grinned. Having an extra brother was _fun_. “Show me your dance move.” 

Bucky coughed and tried a tentative smile. “It's down this way.” He turned and headed deeper into the woods. They climbed over a gigantic fallen tree, picked their way across a rockfall, and squeezed through a crevice before emerging into a dark patch of forest, shaded by the thick canopy overhead so that the entire hollow was in a permanent twilight. 

Shuri's breath caught in her throat. 

“How did you find this?” she breathed. 

She could hear his smirk. “Becca.” 

“Your sister?” She rounded on him. “How?” 

His face darkened in the purple glow of a hundred heart-shaped herbs. “You ever seen cats in this place? Like—little cats?”

She nodded. “The ikati.” They were crepuscular animals, most active at dusk and dawn, so she didn't often see them on her daytime forays. But every Wakandan child knew about them. They kept the rats down. 

“Well, I always liked cats, and I'd never seen _your_ cats in a book, so I … sorta followed them.” 

Shuri laughed. “You fell out of a lot of trees doing that!”

He grinned. “I did, yeah. They're sneaky little buggers. Anyway, one of 'em … I don't know how to say this...” He squinted. “She looked like Becca. I mean, she _looked_ at me like Becca used to. Like she could see my skeleton or something. She _let_ me follow her one day. And she led me here.” 

Shuri looked around at the glowing violet herbs. “You never heard about ikati, you say?”

Bucky shrugged. “They weren't in any books I read as a kid. And Hydra never sent me here, so they weren't in any kind of briefing packet.” 

“No, they wouldn't be.” She smirked up at him. “They're the messengers of Bast.” 

Bucky's mouth fell open. “You're kidding.” 

“I'm not.” She sank to her knees, breathing in the familiar smell of home. “I think you made a friend, Sergeant Barnes.” 

“Bucky,” he corrected automatically. 

“Bucky.” She cupped a leaf under one hand. “Welcome home.”

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. I AM NOT TRYING TO SHIT ON T'CHALLA AS A BROTHER HERE. But he's a busy man, and he's adjusting to being king, and it's reasonable that Shuri would have to adjust to less attention from him.  
> 2\. All the Xhosa in this fic is courtesy of Google Translate. I tried to keep it as simple as possible so you wouldn't need to translate it in order to understand, but if you do … ehhh, it's very loose. A thousand apologies to any Xhosa-speaking readers.  
> 3\. Fun fact: Becca's experience in trig class is a true story. But it happened to my aunt in the 1960s, not Becca in the 1930s. Funner fact: my aunt grew up to become an award-winning math teacher pretty much just to prove that asshole teacher wrong.  
> 4\. Equally fun fact: Spencerian script was on its way out by the 1920s, being replaced by the Palmer method. Bucky learned the older, fancier handwriting. Why? Because my grandfather (born the year after Bucky) wrote in Spencerian. He went out and taught himself to write it because he handled a lot of sensitive government documents in his job and he needed a signature that was difficult to forge. It is my headcanon that Bucky did much the same thing, and pulled out his very fanciest writing to compose a note to an actual honest-to-God princess.  
> 5\. Grandfather birds are not mine, and not Marvel's. They belong to Terry Pratchett and his glorious novel _Nation_ , which you should definitely read because it will change your life and it also because it contains a tree-climbing octopus that can do arithmetic. And grandfather birds. So many grandfather birds.  
> 6\. I probably need to write more about Becca Barnes because that girl just WILL NOT leave me alone.  
> 7\. Come be my friend on Instagram (@onethingconstant) and Twitter (@onbearfeet). I post a lot of pictures of my Bucky Bear and his friends, yell about politics, and try to write novels.


End file.
